The Inventor: Out For Blood In Silicon Valley

I came across this compelling HBO documentary (on Hotstar in India) about the rise and fall of a Healthcare startup Theranos, based out of Silicon Valley and its founder Elizabeth Holmes, promising a miracle blood-tests by taking just a drop of blood and conducting over 200 tests instead of tubes of blood that are required nowadays to conduct multiple tests.

It’s shocking how seasoned investors, invested over $900 million in this company without ever actually seeing how the technology actually worked. The company was valued at $9 Billion in 2015 and crashed to $0 in 2018, once its fraud was unearthed by a Wall Street Journal reporter.

The magnitude of this fraud has turned this into a big story where authorities were involved and also turned it into a documentary. Whereas multiple such cases of ‘fraud’ and ‘lies’ exist in the silicon valley and startups in the rest of the world.

I don’t think every wannabe entrepreneur is a fraud but some of them are zealots and have the knack and connections to impress the ones in power or ability to influence government and regulatory agencies.

Who is responsible to make such ‘entrepreneurs’ and their startups accountable? Is anyone thinking about how the money ‘wasted’ will be recouped and from whom? And how does it affect the startup ecosystem and many genuine entrepreneurs looking for funding?

And most important question, is this a prudent mantra the startups should live by: